What are the crawl errors and how to fix them?

crawl errors

The major obstacle for the growth of any online business is unnoticed errors occurring in your website. Identifying and fixing them timely would enhance the performance of your website and helps it expand constantly.

So do you also face difficulty in understanding the crawl errors? No worries! Here I present you with a detailed description of what is crawl errors and how you can fix them.

Let’s get started!

A description on Crawl Errors!

Crawl error is an error which occurs when the search engine tries to reach a page on your website but fails to do so. Whereas, crawling is the process where the search engine tries to visit every page of your website through a bot. Search engine bot first finds a link to your website and then searches all your public pages from there. The bot crawls the pages and indexes all the contents to use in Google.

As a website owner, your main goal should be to make sure that search engine bot can get to all pages of your website. And when this process fails Google crawl shows an error what we call Crawl error.

There are many crawl errors which Google divides into two categories:

1. Site error

This error means your entire site can’t be crawled which means you have been damaged.

2. URL error

This error relates to only one particular URL site per error. These errors are easier to maintain and fix.

Let’s go deeper into these errors to see other sub errors in these two categories.

Site Errors

There are many reasons behind the occurrence of site error. This includes:

  • DNS error (Domain Name System) – This error shows that search engine can’t communicate to your server either because the server is down or because there’s an issue with the DNS route to your site domain. You no need to worry as it is a temporary issue.
How to fix

To fix your DNS error, Google recommends you using Fetch as Google tool to check how Google bot crawls your web page. If you want your DNS connection to act quickly then you can fetch without providing.

Now check with your DNS provider where the issue is. And ensure your server displays a 404 or 500 error code. These error codes are much accurate than having a DNS error on your site.

  • Server Error – This error means that Google bot isn’t able to access your URL, maybe because your request time is out or site is busy. This may also mean that your site has end number of visitors that the server isn’t able to handle all the requests.
How to fix

Google’s official guidelines to fix server error are to use Fetch as Google to see if Google bot can crawl your site now. If you get content of your homepage without a problem then you can assume that Google bot is able to access your site properly.

So before you fix your server error, you first need to see which type of server error you’re getting since they are of many types:

  • Timeout
  • Connection reset
  • Connection failed
  • No response
  • Connection timeout
  • Truncated response or headers

To address each of these above errors is not easy to include in this article, but you can reference Google Search Console Help to diagnose these particular errors.

  • Robots.txt failure – Before crawling your site, Google bot crawls your robots.txt files to see if there is any page that you’ve not indexed yet. In case of a bot isn’t able to reach your website, Google will postpone the crawl rather than risk crawling URLs that you don’t want to crawl. Make sure your robots.txt file is available.
How to fix

To properly configure your robot.txt file, you first need to Double-check which pages you want Google bot to not to crawl. Now Triple-check the all-powerful line of “Disallow:/” and make sure line DOES NOT exist unless you want your site to appear on Google search result.

If you’re still getting errors, use a server header checker tool to see whether your file is returning a 200 or 400 error or not.

So you need to fix this error as Google will not crawl your website unless and until you fix any of the issue present in your site. The robot.txt error can bring catastrophic results if you don’t check it early or often.

URL Errors

URL errors include many reasons. These are:

  • Common URL error – This error occurs when a search engine tries to crawl a specific web page. This error shows 404 pages not found which we see every day while working on the system.
How to fix

To fix your 404 error, you need to take some steps such as:

Make sure the page is published from your site content management and is not in draft mode or deleted.

Check 404 is the right page and not another variation. Now check whether your site is showing the www or non-www version of your site and the HTTP vs. https version of your site. You can see Moz canonicalization to know more.  

It’s a well-known fact that 404 errors mean a dead page. So if you want to make your page live again then make sure your 301 redirect it to the most appropriate or correct page.

  • Mobile-specific URL error – This type of crawl error only occurs in smartphone or devices. If your website isn’t responding then you will likely see this error in your device and vice versa. The most common mobile-specific URL errors are faulty redirects.

To fix mobile-specific URL error, you need to refresh your website or if it doesn’t work then you can contact to any expertise that can help you solve this error in your device.

Let’s move further and see the solution to fixing these crawl errors.

Conclusion!

Google crawl errors just can’t be ignored if you want to operate your website effectively and efficiently. These errors can create a blunder for you if not fixed properly on time. I hope this article helped you understand what Google Crawl errors are and how you can fix them.

So if you encounter any crawl error while operating your site page, you can take the help of this article to fix them off. Till then get in touch with us for more updates.